The worst Android tablet — A quick teardown

Expectations.

When buying a cheap device, I don’t expect a display with “Retina” quality, but it should still be usable and not something the engineers who designed it have to be ashamed about. It shouldn’t be a piece of shit (in this case it wasn’t). The same goes for all other parts. I can live with less memory, but it should not be defective. If a device claims “Quad Core” I expect it to be reasonably snappy and not turn into a hibernating grizzly every 5 minutes. Cheap devices require trade-offs, but general usability should not be among that.

First the positive.

Compared to 2 other cheap Android tablets I’ve used, the display is of reasonable quality. Not “Retina”, but evenly lit, reasonably bright, good contrast & viewing angle… average, but not bad. I’ve seen & cursed much worse. That’s about it. The rest is pure evil.

The negative.

Both cameras are fix-focus, noisy and plainly suck. There is no flash. Unusable unless in broad daylight. The sound is “meh” at best. The screen is covered in plastic, doomed to get scratched without a screen protector. But these things are… shall we say minor pet peeves. THE WORST part about this device is the flash storage. It is SLOOOOW and I suspect it is defective to some degree. It was snappy for the first few months and it’s been going downhill ever since. Factory reset or “TRIM” is useless. “IOWAIT” goes up to 100% most of the time & transfer rates ranges from severeal kb/s to maybe 4MB/s. Most of the time it is SLOOOOOW. You simply cannot install an app and expect the device to be usable in the meantime. Just for comparison, my smartphone (Samsumg A3 2016) hasn’t shown any sign of “falling asleep” and I’ve been using it excessively for more than 6 months now. BTW, this tablet is the 2nd one of the same model. The 1st one I purchased was unusable right away: DOA & instantly RMA-ed.

Now, what am I to do with this thing? It is 100% unusable, unless you need to get your blood pressure up by several orders of magnitude. I have no choice but to tear it to pieces, take photos & reassemble it again. I might try to salvage a few parts (or not). Once that is done, I need to rest for a while & summon my forces for “The Reckoning”.

And so it begins…

A small screwdriver was enough to defeat the clips. However, they “cud at-tak at any time, zo ve must deeeeeeel with it!”.

The dual camera module.

How much extra did this cost?

The main board is a bit loose. At least they put a sheet of plastic below.

And now one of the most important parts of the whole device: THE RESET BUTTON. It’s below and a bit to the left of the RTL8723AS WiFi/BT module.

Again, this device is unusable, so how about DIGGING DEEPER?

To be continued…